Just drawing attention to the fact that Columbia A is indeed flying to this because it's the only PIANO date that our whole team can play, and if MSU and Chicago can be roped in this there's suddenly a crazy strong pre-nats field, so I'm gonna need you all to FREE YOUR MINDS about a Sunday event an...

This project is now being integrated with QBNotify to tell registered staffers about local tournaments. If anyone has suggestions on an efficient way to notify tournament hosts of available staffers, I'd be open to hearing them. For now, name and email information on local staffers is available to t...

Having sites at Northwestern and Michigan both strikes me as not the best idea, especially given that Northwestern SCT's Division 1 had 6 teams from 3 schools attend, at least one of which the Michigan site is more convenient for. It's roughly a 4 hour drive between the two, and all the teams that w...

OK Will and Jacob are correct that I definitely had too narrow of a view of what "literary criticism" is in my initial post. You should read the essays at the beginnings of editions of novels. I'll say, however, that whether pursuing secondary literature as a matter of first resort in learning about...

I'd advocate learning the canon in terms of plots, character names, etc. before you start delving into literary criticism. My entry point into literature was noticing topics I was annoyed at getting beaten to and just reading either the works themselves or the wikipedia articles on them. Later, I st...

If you mean Bollywood as in "Indian popular film", the Satantango comparison doesn't really hold water; they'd be in different parts of the distribution (art vs. trash). I'd also be interested in seeing an expansion in Nollywood content but recognize basically no one would convert that.

Hi everyone! To shift the discussion to the set itself, I'm very honored to be editing this year's iteration of NASAT. I am aware that last year's set had issues (many of which were the result of a rushed production schedule and no fault of the editors), so I've tried to approach this job with a con...

I heartily second everything in Alex's post. I realize this may seem odd coming from an elderly 19-year-old with an acronym or two in his sig, but I felt pretty much the same way you did upon first finding the forums. I know the sheer amount of information people seem to take for granted that everyo...

I invite you to make and post your list of the 25 best history players in the greater Naperville area OK. 1. Me, the most important part of this list and also the protagonist of reality 2-25. The first 24 people in your dumb list lol Govind, Asil, and Arjun should also be in there somewhere but I d...

While I have no issue with going long distances (including to Minnesota!) for tournaments (and neither do my teammates ), we remain under budgetary and "no one wants to drive 9 1/2 hours"-ary constraints that people telling us to "suck it up and drive" and petulantly threatening to boycott this tour...

Just posting here to say that this new OSU site is likely the difference between Michigan State attending this tournament and either not doing that or paying exorbitant sums out of pocket. I applaud the editors' decision to announce it.

I'm not sure if this is really an issue, but the book in the leadin of the cookbooks tossup has a name that literally translates from the Arabic as "Book of cooking". In an ideal scenario, that tossup might've been altered to reward knowledge of the history of cookbooks rather than language, but I r...

I really enjoyed playing this set. A few feng shui challenges aside, the editing was quite strong, especially when it came to keeping difficulty appropriate and consistent throughout. My only major concern lies with how world history was handled in the set. Way too many packets had a "world history...

I'm working on converting stats from this from QBWiki to SQBS since Jonah seems to show no interest in doing so. Stats should be up within a day, which in my opinion is a reasonable amount of time to make people wait for accessible stats in a standardized format (as opposed to, say, at least three m...

Given that the logistics issues I expressed concern about earlier in this thread seem to have come to pass, I would recommend giving more heed to community feedback in the future. Setbacks like this happen to us all, but I'd be concerned if the issues with this tournament were to be replicated next ...

Thanks for working on this, this will be useful to a lot of people. Will all of the staffers' information be available on the front page, or will viewing information of staffers near you require entering a query? If the former, will this be indexed by search engines? If the latter, are the people l...

(This is the same as a thread created earlier in the collegiate section, but also seems highly relevant to high school) Given that connecting outsiders willing to staff and tournaments that need outside staff is a persistent problem in QB, Matt Mitchell, Ryan Rosenberg, and I are working on a projec...

Given that connecting outsiders willing to staff and tournaments that need outside staff is a persistent problem in QB, Matt Mitchell, Ryan Rosenberg, and I are working on a project that should help remedy that. The following google form represents the data collection stage of what will eventually b...

It looks like community opinion on this change (which, in my opinion, is a bad idea for the reasons outlined above) is pretty much unanimously against it. I realize NAQT is very busy, but can we expect a response on that soon?

I applaud your ambition, but rather than trying to run two tournaments at once, it might be more advisable to run the SCOP mirror without the individual tournament. I realize this might reduce your revenue a bit, but providing a quality experience to all the teams playing this tournament rather than...

In chess, it is my understanding that there are tournaments, say, for players with Elo of 1000-1500, 1500-1700, etc. Know how strong the people playing your tournament are. Chess has reduced "how good a player is" to a simple number, and made this number trivially easy to look up in an authoritativ...

Novice tournaments can be a very valuable tool for outreach (one of my current teammates was first motivated to study seriously by a positive experience at a novice tournament, in fact). This is why it is crucial that players playing novice tournaments are all players that can seriously benefit from...

In case you haven't seen it on the discord, here's an availability poll. Please fill it out; given the responses now I'm leaning toward 5:30-8 PM EST this coming Saturday, but it would be nice to get more people's feedback https://www.when2meet.com/?7076994-37KEV

In case there's interest, I've created a discord server where writeups for both the overall preseason poll and this poll will be compiled. You can join at the following link: https://discord.gg/X5rHAbg

I'd like to do a preview for the year, one that provides more information and comments from the teams involved as opposed to just wild mass guessing, but I don't know how much time I will have. I hope to contact a number of the ranked teams. If people want to do the usual format (roundtable and sum...

I love the idea of the second shirt, but I wish the content could be clearer--celebrating women's participation and accomplishments in quizbowl is fantastic, but the message seems vague and easily misinterpreted. That said, I do not have any ideas for a replacement image. To poach an idea from seve...

This happened and stats are up for it! Danzig with the Stars (Doug Simons, Jason Cheng, and Austin Foos) defeated Stay Together and Don't Be Racist (Matthew Lehmann, William Golden, Peter Schmidt, and Alex Schmidt) in a final. Thanks to everyone for playing! A British mirror is probably happening du...

This is happening today! If you didn't get the logistics email, the tournament will be conducted on the following discord. Please be on it by 1:50 Eastern: https://discord.gg/3Aq5wC. A schedule is up on the signup sheet.

This is indeed happening; the tournament will start at 1 PM Central Time and will likely run 3-4 hours. A discord server link will be forthcoming. If you haven't supplied your email on the signup sheet yet, please do so now. I'll close the field and assign teams at roughly 5 PM central tomorrow.